Four days of All-Star action in Paris were full of memorable moments. The All-Star Challenge was close the whole way. In the end, Team Ice won the All-Star Challenge thanks to Ice’s team captain Froggen defeating Team Fire’s Weixiao in a final 1v1 duel. In the All-Star Invitational, SK Telecom T1 K stole the show. The 2013 World Champions ran off a perfect 9-0 record to win the tournament, but not before North America’s Cloud 9 had a statement win of their own.

ALL-STAR CHALLENGE

All-Stars being held in the City of Love turned out to be fitting as CJ Entus Frost’s MadLife and Counter Logic Gaming’s Doublelift united in the bottom lane to be a major cog in the Team Ice machine. The two players were fast friends that were seen duo queuing together before the tournament, and and then proceeded to dominate through much of the All-Star Challenge. It was Doublelift that turned out to be the primary impetus behind Ice’s win in Hexakill thanks to his 7/0/7 score on Lucian. In both the Pick 10 and Hexakill matches, MadLife on Thresh not only empowered Doublelift but the rest of the team by way of his ubiquitous map presence.

FROGGEN, THE HERO ICE NEEDED

After Team Fire dominated Team Ice in URF mode on Day 1, Ice had to regroup. Another blowout like that, and the All-Star Challenge would be over by Day 2. The burden of leadership fell hard on team captain Froggen. Luckily for Ice, he was up to the challenge. It was Froggen that posted a 9/3/12 score on Irelia during Hexakill. It was Froggen that dropped an obscene 11/0/14 KDA on Anivia versus Bjergsen’s Zed. Even through all of those gaudy statistics, he managed to save the best for last.

When the chips were down and the score was tied, Ice turned to their captain for a victory and he delivered it in stunning fashion. In the final 1v1 duel against Weixiao from China’s Team WE, it was Froggen that secured the final victory for Team Ice on Yasuo.

CLOUD 9 SCORES WIN AGAINST ASIAN POWERHOUSE

The storyline surrounding Cloud 9 going into All-Stars 2014 focused on the unfortunate injury of mid laner and team captain Hai. His inability to travel due to a collapsed lung led to the team acquiring CLG’s Link as a fill-in for the tournament. The switch lowered expectations, but the team responded to the adversity and shocked the tournament when they came out of the group stage as the No. 2 seed after upsetting the LPL’s OMG. While Cloud 9 has scored other wins over Asians teams, (Taipei Assassins & Team WE at IEM Katowice) none of them had the same panache as OMG. It is true that OMG responded with a 2-0 sweep during the bracket stage to knock Cloud 9 out of the tournament, but the Cloud 9 win shows that their hard work in the NA LCSis paying dividends in the form of wins against top level competition.

KOREA REIGNS SUPREME

SK Telecom T1 K’s loss to Samsung Galaxy Ozone in the OGN Champions Spring quarterfinals and their subsequent loss to CJ Entus Frost in NLB gave the rest of the world hope that SK Telecom T1 K was vulnerable. Throughout the group stage, a combination of close wins and vicious stomps left questions about how good T1 K actually was. However after their 2-0 destruction of Fnatic in the bracket stage, the only thing standing between SK Telecom T1 K and plunging the League of Legends world into another long night of Korean primacy was China’s OMG.

Even one win proved elusive as SK Telecom T1 K swept their way to a tournament victory. Game 1 was wildly entertaining as OMG built a composition that featured some of their strongest picks. It was a fifty minute back-and-forth affair that boded well for the remainder of the series. Unfortunately, the long game wrecked OMG’s confidence, and served to deepen the focus of T1 K. The hope that had come about as a byproduct of T1 K’s struggles at home died in a storm of Silver Bolts from Piglet’s Vayne and Unleashed Power from Faker’s Syndra.

WHAT’S NEXT?

All-Stars 2014 is over. The 2014 World Championship is only a few months away, and SK Telecom T1 K’s dominant performance has put tremendous pressure on every other region to elevate its game to the next level before what happened in Paris is repeated in Seoul.